A 37-year-old wanting to learn computer science

I don't mean to be a jerk, but I'm having trouble figuring out what the point of the post or of posting the post here is. Are you asking for advice? Feedback? Suggestions? Criticism? Support? The only question your post asks is "but who am I really?"

To be honest, what I hear in the paragraphs that follow is less a description of yourself than the pronouncement that you are capable, curious, and driven to learn more, that you're excited and motivated by the breadth and depth of tech -- that there's so much to learn and so much to study and you want to know all of it. That's a wonderful starting point, but it also sounds as though you are or will be prone to a kind of paralysis.

You have a list of projects you want to work on. This is good. Study will give you a foundation (personally, I found DS&A, once I approached it methodically and patiently, by far the funnest part of learning programming and CS, so projects aren't the only way), but building will give you something to put on top of it, figuratively speaking.

Just keep on mind that you're probably not going to build these things from first principles, so you're probably not going to learn operating systems, networking, or programming languages. Rather, your going to develop skill in specific tools rely onthose technologies. That's fine. But if you really do want to dig very specifically into the subjects and technologies themselves, then you needto be aware that building the products or projects you've described isn't going to give you the progress you seem to want.

If you really do want to know networking, don't build a website; implement, I don't know, telnet or tcp/ip from scratch after reading the spec. If you really want to know operating systems, build one. If you want to understand programming languages, DS&A, and algorithmic analysis, familiarize yourself with some instruction sets; learn discrete math; learn what lambda calcus is and how it's used.

> Adult ADHD

I have severe ADHD. I could not survive in the tech world without treatment and medication. YMMV, but you should get treatment if you haven't already. Last time I checked, there was essentially no empirical evidence supporting the coping strategies so many people advocate. Medication is the one, and the only, proven treatment for the condition.

I’m glad that you’re following your passion.

It’s been difficult talking with people that have made the decision to go into development, because it’s a weird and risky occupation right now.

An analogy would be wanting to become an artist, so you learn your way into a field position on a semi-pro baseball league where artists play baseball. Some players come up with their own unique spin on the ball as they throw it, others attempt to swing the bat the way they’ve been told. Older players may have advice, but not play as hard. The goal is to just make points, and new players are in awe of the artistic ways they could become great and make bank. For years and years, players would get injured, fired, or just age out in their thirties, because you rarely ever saw anyone older; there were some small old person leagues, too, I guess? And older players might become managers, coaches, owners, sports journalists, or just leave the profession. They just kind of disappear- people are only thinking about the game. But, within the past several months, players have started working independently with robots on the field. The companies making the robots swap out new robots every few weeks which compliment the players and play something that seems like baseball, but often isn’t. People worry that robots seem to be attempting to takeover the jobs of the players. They mostly hit some runs when no one is on base, but they create holes in the field in the process. People don’t understand why the players are either micromanaging the robots or are spending time filling holes, because the robots score points, and they’re focused on the scoreboard.

Does the artist belong on a baseball field?

Is there a more efficient way to score points?

Knowledgeable human friends also make mistakes! They are not infallible experts who never get things wrong.

Both humans and LLMs may know more than you and may have additional perspectives and experiences to draw on. Just like you'd not trust a knowledgeable friend to be omnipotent and 100% correct 100% of the time when you ask for advice, neither would you an AI.

But the point I was trying to make was to not use AI to implement things for you (even tests) as you're not going to learn if the AI is doing the repetition for you. You can supervise yes, but only when you've been there and learnt the ropes already (i.e. when you are already an experienced software engineer and know the details)

> I have severe ADHD. I could not survive in the tech world without treatment and medication. YMMV, but you should get treatment if you haven't already.

I won't speak for OP, but from what I've been able to figure out locally, it's quite difficult (will take years and is largely down to chance, and anything you might to do help the process along is inhibited by the condition itself) to even get a diagnosis unless you're quite wealthy and willing to spend a chunk of it.

Not OP but when I was way younger I had some trouble learning programming languages. Following tutorials was boring and gave limited instructions. Someone on the internet gave the same piece of advice, i.e. to do something useful in your life.

I was at the time downloading a lot of porn pictures but the internet connection was slow and unreliable. And that's how I learned the Ruby programming language with its regexes, how to parse HTML with those regexes, parsing CLI arguments, and how to download files and put them in proper folders. It was the cleanest and best script/framework I have ever written.

The moral of the story is to find something to do, and it will show you a lot more.